Muslim Girls Orphanage

It seems like it's been so long since I've found the time to sit down and get some of this stuff out!
Just went through my camera and realised how much I have missed updating on...
At the end of August we had an event called Action in the Community where we had 50 participants come to do a number of projects for some of our community partners. It was a great event, and it gave me a chance to spend 3 days at one of our partners the Muslim Girls Orphanage.
The organization has a lot of space in the city, not far from Sangam. It has a dorm building that holds 180 girls who live there on site. Here in India (and especially in the Muslim religion), orphan has a different meaning than in Canada. Here you are an "orphan" if you come from a single parent family where the mother is the caretaker, if you come from an at risk family where the parent has a dangerous or unsuitable profession, or if the parent cannot care for the child.
There are a few schools on the grounds including one urdu medium elementary school, one urdu medium high school, and a polytechnique. At the polytechnique they teach the girls trades so that they can work and be contributing members of the family when they are married. They teach tailoring, design, embroidery, a home management class, personal care (massage, threading, hair cutting, etc), computer classes, etc. And the girls also get certification in most of those classes so its a great opportunity for them to learn more and develop themselves.
So as part of our time there we did a brief tour of the facilities and met with the principal of the polytechnique and the head of the site in Pune. And then we moved into the projects which were sorting the stone out of rice, cutting vegetables, and designing, painting and installing 3 paintings in the dorm building to cover up an elevator shaft that was unused (no money to get the elevator).
So we spent time in the mornings playing games with about 50 kids for 2 hours, then the tour, then lunch and project time! In the morning the girls from the Urdu medium schools were around as their classes didn't start until 12 oclock, and in the afternoon we had about 20 girls from the English medium classes come back from school as they attended in the mornings. It was a blast for me to spend the time with the kids there for the 3 days...and it gave me a taste of what volunteers feel when working with kids abroad, it was great.
The best part for me was hanging out in the afternoons with the English medium kids. They helped facilitate conversation between the older kids and staff members at Muslim Girls, and they gave me a chance to find out what their stories were and how things worked there right from the source. It was great to be greeted every morning with "Didi!" shouted from the windows as we came to the dorm.
It was such a great experience for me, but I had a really hard time on the last day saying goodbye. I had talked to my favourite few girls all afternoon and they were telling me about their families and how they can visit every Sunday for one hour. So mostly their mothers come, but if they are sick their brothers will come visit them. These girls were from families with 2 or 3 brothers who lived with their mother, but they had to live here away from them all. And when I asked if they ever go home, they said with such joy that they go home in December. They said they get to "move out", and pack up all their things...so I assumed it was for a long, long time and then they told me it was only 2 weeks. It just sort of broke my heart thinking that these girls manage so well in their situation without worrying of what they have lost. Most of the girls will live in the orphanage until they are 18, at which point the organization finds a husband for them and arranges (and helps pay for) the marriage.
It just put things into perspective and has continually made me keep myself in check when I start to get sad about missing friends and family...I really need to go back there soon and check in with those girls.